Thoughts.

Given the recent news of the NCUA (thus far getting an admittedly lesser response than the initial C1 announcement–which is sure to change once the weekend is over), and this particular post by Dusty (even if the blogging has stopped, he’s still worth reading), I’ve been pondering this question over the last couple days.

Whoops. I did say I don’t really know what I’m talking about…I’ll leave it there.
Please feel free to chip in with your thoughts here–apologies to my Aussie readers, I’m not sure how much of this actually has relevance to the way you structure things over there.

If you really scour my blog, you can find this info on my UCPC post on Alan Goldberg’s talk.

Rather than subscribe to stress, free yourself with focus. The opportunities to let yourself go and be content to simply live are limitless. You can become a better ultimate player in this way, and a better person, as well.

UPDATE: Micah adds in the comments that Dr. Goldberg has his own site up and running–I haven’t given it an in-depth look to say for or against it yet (it can often be the case that such sites are simply used to hook more customers without offering any of the meat of their ideas), but you might find it helpful.

This really makes me wish I was playing ultimate right now.

Oh well. I guess there’s the one 5v5 beach ultimate tourney with a pickup team to tide me over for the next year…

This is an open question, and one I’d like to see some readers comment on if you’re so inclined.

Why do YOU play?

Do you think about what you say?

I know you think you do. But do you really think about what you say? About how what you say might reveal things about yourself you had no intention of revealing? About how what you say might affect your teammates’ or your own ability to perform?

There are a few ways to cope in ultimate. By “cope” I don’t mean dealing with failure. By “cope” I mean getting by and continuing to perform with the grind of 3, 4 games in a day. I’m talking about the entirety of your day’s experience, not just what you think of as the “critical,” “game-defining” moments (or especially their aftermath).

Largely, I think you can divide coping strategies into two camps. You have passive coping, and you have active coping. This goes a bit with personality types as well.

Your passive copers more or less go with whatever the flow of the moment is. If things are going well and/or the team is getting excited, they (can) get excited. If things are not going as well, your passive types are generally at a loss for what to do to right the ship. On their own, they can’t create much. They’re sheep, psychologically speaking, able to be molded and guided to various ends.

Your active types, for better or worse, help to catalyze the passive types. This is the guy on the other team that’s always initiating the call in the other team’s call and response cheer. This is the guy that rushes the field ahead of the rest. This is the girl that spikes the disc to get her teammates pumped up.

This is also the type that most strongly influences the team’s level of arousal–how up or down a team gets for playing. Most teams will have more than one of these, but how these individuals respond to the team’s fortunes–whether that be success or setback–will tend to set the tone for the rest of the team. As a general rule, you can get enhanced performance out of getting “up” for a given moment or game, but over the course of a weekend this level of intensity is near impossible to sustain and will be prone to crash downwards (usually responsible in some form or another for most comebacks in ultimate). Rare indeed is the individual who can sustain themselves purely out of emotion, so learning to guide the team towards a more balanced state of mind is the ideal here.

Whether naturally inclined to be more passive or more active, you can still learn to talk and carry yourself in such a way that your teammates can more easily remain at a balanced level of arousal.

For a bit of a discussion on the notion of psychology and performance, check out my UCPC recap from two years ago of Alan Greenberg’s talk on performance psychology.

The key thing to note here–optimal performance comes when a player is fully invested in the experience at hand (literally, if we’re talking about catching or throwing). Players who focus too much on what just happened, or what might happen, rather than on what IS happening, are the sorts of players who wind up in their own heads, botching easy plays or attempting the sorts of actions that you normally wouldn’t expect from them. The score, for instance, has nothing to do with your performance on the field. So you were just broken–so what? Other than perhaps making strategic adjustments, there’s no need to dwell on the matter. So your team will go to nationals if it can just close out this game–so what? You haven’t closed it out yet. Don’t start dreaming about Nationals, and don’t start dreaming of what might happen if you don’t make the cut. Get your head in the game, while cliche, is totally appropriate here.

So how do you talk to encourage continued performance? Some do’s and don’ts:

DO

• Focus on the process rather than the outcome. If you’re a captain or a coach (coaches can afford to think a bit more broadly, as they don’t have to perform), and have to give the team guidance, to some extent you need to be aware of what parts of your team’s process are or are not working. This manifests in talk to the effect of “our dump motion is good; we’re having a few miscues with our handlers, so handlers need to focus on making one hard cut and clearing out to create space for the fill cut,” rather than “we’re getting beaten on short turnovers on the dump. Last point Mackey was dancing out there in the lane and clogged it up for everybody else.” With the former the focus is on improving the process; in the latter it is on the outcome, and additionally focuses on a single individual and a single situation–as soon as you get your athletes thinking about specific incidents in the past you’re taking them out of their game-ready state.
• Avoid talk on the line about anything other than the next point’s strategy. Yeah, you joke around on the line a bit. But at some point, your need to focus on what’s going to happen in the point–you’re going to have to get your mindset ready to play at some point during the point; it’s usually best if this point is before the pull instead of during or after. On Dartmouth this year, our O line cued themselves to get their head in the game and focus on the next point with an all-together clap, in much the same way a football huddle breaks. You might think it’s silly, but all it takes is something as simple and consistent as that to get your head right.
• Cue everyone to keep focused. You don’t necessarily have to do this by explicitly stating “hey guys, let’s focus,” but there are far worse things you can say than that. Your team should want to stay in the game–if they’re reluctant to, you’ve got bigger problems than simply player focus–so it shouldn’t take much to cue players on the sideline to stay focused on the now rather than getting caught up in whatever the day’s drama (or cool play, etc) is.
• Talk in terms of actions the team can take, rather than describing a situation. It’s all well and good to recount what just happened in the first half, but really, that doesn’t help your team out nearly as much as describing to them what should be focused on in the second half. Generally speaking, you don’t need to justify why certain adjustments are being made (you can simply offer, “we’re going to try zone” if they’ve been burning you in man–nobody needs to be reminded to know the reasons for which the change is occuring), simply give instruction and trust your team to execute. Keep the focus on the field in the current point.

DON’T

• Be “that guy.” The one who’s always talking. Even if you’re encouraging your teammates to stay focused, realize that if you hassle too much (and lack the authority/respect of a coach or captain–and sometimes even if you do have it) you might take their minds off of whatever they were thinking about, only to divert those thoughts to resentment of you. Develop a feel for your teammates and what they need to cue focus, and strive to help them keep themselves in line too–this is not a one man job, by any means, but avoiding pitfalls is a team effort.
• Bring up specific incidents on the field until after the game is over (the need for performance has ceased). I’m talking about call-outs here, not the sort of discussion you have with a teammate after a point ends to clarify when the miscommunication occurred and what could be done to correct it next time. Like the example above, there is little to no productive effect to calling a player out for a bad play, and generally little gain from calling a player out for a single exceptional play (if your goal is learning, however, it might be wise to point out examples of the behavior you want all of your players to model).
• Talk about the other team. Strategically, you can certainly talk to your team with new objectives in mind, but remarking on the team’s: relative level of ability (“we should beat these guys”); personality (“these guys are assholes”); stud players (“#33 is really good!”), etc.
• Tolerate comments or behavior which focuses on results or anything other than the situation at hand. Obviously, social decency means you tread carefully on this rather than stomping on somebody who’s talking–remember the first bullet for “Don’t”‘s–but to the extent that you can eliminate the tendency for your team to, for instance, go on and on about what specifically went wrong in a specific instance or players to offer comments that aren’t specifically geared towards focusing on the game at hand and what actions need to be taken in the huddle, the more your players will be able to remain in an optimal performance state.
• Call players out for good/bad/whatever play while they are on the field. It’s one thing to give feedback after a point is over. One of the worst things you can do to a player who is in the flow of a point is force them to think about something they did previously by referring to some incident in the past or to what you expect them to do in the future. This does not mean you can’t offer encouragement and helpful information–”left/right shoulder” in a zone is helpful; “I expect another hot D this point, Kell” is not. Under no circumstances should you force a player to think on the field! I don’t mean the cognitive processes necessary for a given point, reading one’s man or the defense, etc, I mean thinking about that cute guy on the sideline, or about the last sweet play she made–the play has already been made. Relive it later when she doesn’t have to play.
• Ask what the score is right before the pull goes up when you’re on the line. Big pet peeve of mine. If you think being down by one or up by one should make a difference in how you play, note that you just agreed to thinking–the anathema to performance. The ONLY time score should be relevant to you as a player is in situations like universe point, where you know that you do not need to conserve your energy for another point following this one. Thinking about your team’s lead or deficit is otherwise a pretty fruitless endeavor. Leave the score keeping to your coach, or to somebody who isn’t you on the sideline.

You get the idea. As a general rule, don’t think, do (note that this was one of the first posts I made on this blog). Don’t talk, instruct. Don’t recap…refocus. And execute. It’s that simple (and that hard).

And so it was that the 25th-seeded pickup team won.

What a great change of pace. After a long denouement to my ultimate career after regionals, with a brief, minor peak against Arizona at nationals, I’d found my passion for play fading (though my fascination with learning and teaching in this sport and otherwise continues as strong as ever).

But a glimmer of hope. Strangely, found it whilst tooling on some 15 and 16 year olds at the summer camp I was working at (perhaps you’ve heard of CTY? More than a few ultimate types got their start playing there, despite the camp ostensibly having nothing to do with ultimate). Somewhere in the flurry of terrible decisions and missed executions, punctuated by goals scored by yours truly (and staff accompaniment), I found it.

What was it? The joy of playing, of course! I had forgotten what it felt like. Those weeks of practice between regionals and nationals–they weren’t joyful. They were focused, they were dedicated to improving ourselves. They were work. Even at nationals, that sense of work stuck. Only when I could bring it all to fruition and really play in Colorado did it all mean something.

Similarly, I’d been tooling around with my throws, sure, thinking a lot about ultimate, yes, but I’d been missing the joy. The dam started leaking tooling on the teenagers, and the trickle became a river playing in Ow My Knee, tooling on dults.

Why lie. It’s a lot of fun to be good. It’s easy when you win. Playing this weekend, with a team of friends who not only played, but were damn good, was EXACTLY what I needed.

Particularly on Sunday, when we played legitimate mixed teams, that practice, and take themselves seriously, it was great to go and chill, pile together, and drink water during timeouts and halftime while our opponents huddled together and talked strategy. And then go back out and beat them (like our come-from-behind, universe point victory over 7 express in the final–we were down something like 7-10 when the cap horn sounded).

This is less a recap and more a rejoicing–this is why I play ultimate. I had my doubts about playing elite when I return stateside (and easing those doubts is not a guarantee that I’ll feel any more confident in a year’s time when I get back from Japan, where I’m teaching English next year), but my passion has been re-invigorated.

College is impossible to recapture–the people, the community, the commitment were all so different than anything I could hope to ever find again–but playing in OMK reminded me of the other aspect, that part that drew m to Dartmouth Ultimate in the first place–not the Dartmouth, but the ultimate. I love this sport.

What to say.

My collegiate career is over.

Soon enough I’ll be leaving this school, separating from my friends of many years, and moving on with my life.

What’s it all for? What’s it all about? I struggled with this thought on Friday. We had already made the national tournament., only the second time our program has done so, and going into the year we never really had any concrete goals outside of peaking at regionals–and what a peak it was! Two of the best, most emotional days of ultimate I’ve ever experienced. The energy was palpable. We had bunches of alums, friends, family (my parents got to watch me play ultimate for the first time in the regional final), all rooting for us. It’s the sort of atmosphere that makes me happy to play this sport, to know that the work and effort I’d invested could be made manifest in such a way.

We won the region…and then? What? More ultimate. As Socks put it at one point, it’s like having a really good friend over to visit, you have a great time seeing them, and then the time comes for them to go…and after leaving in the morning, you get a knock on your door that afternoon–your friend is back, he missed his train. While it’s still really great to have them there, it’s just not the same. This was how I went through practice the week after regionals. Closing in on the dance itself, we had a team meeting, generally got on the same page of loving the chance to play with each other and be the Pain Train in its current form one last time, and I had a bit more vigor and a bit more excitement for the sport as we left for Colorado.

But Friday came, and I was flat. We opened against Carleton–very good, talented team–but I got caught flat-footed and beat to the open side more than once. For goals. Where was the fire? The desire to put it on the line for my teammates?

I was still missing it against Colorado. I’d gotten a bit more will to play and work to show on the field, but the focus was missing. I cheered on the sidelines, but that was mostly just going through the motions.

We finished against UCSC after a bye. We won this one, but did I really bring anything more than I did to the previous two games? I had more opportunities to play harder, so in aggregate, yes, I played harder. It was good to win, but I could have just as easily lost that game, in terms of investment in the result.

I still don’t have a good answer for how I felt.

But then, Saturday came. Arizona. What a game. I spent most of the game covering Joe Kershner, whose name you might recognize as the top of the heap in this year’s Callahan award. Really great guy, totally deserving. First point of the game we introduced ourselves to each other, and exchanged some words over the course of the game. Dude knows how to ball, but I do too, which made it a lot of fun on both sides of the disc. Getting to run him around on the turns was great–probably half of my elation from playing this game stems from my being a cutter for almost all of the game.

An amazing game to play in–my new best game I’ve ever played in (supplanting my sophomore year vs. Brown in teh quarterfinals at NE regionals–that still remains the tightest game I’ve ever played in, Brown hardly turned it over all game thanks to the unstoppableness of C-Mo). Certainly a game that I was happy to end my career on.

…but then we had two more games. I was pretty banged up from the ‘zona game (bashed my knee on a bid early, and it’d been swelling up on me since), and combine that with the 5-minute break between games (going to 17-16 meant we were well past cap), and we came out flat. I only played a point in this game (though I got to finally throw the skirt on, now that we were out of contention). We were within striking distance but let this game get away from us pretty quickly.

After that, it was Delaware, and after a bye we had a lot more energy and rolled in this game. I played a few more points in this game, including the game’s final point–in a clam set, the final play of my collegiate career was a layout D, which I caught–however, given that the Del player was not anticipating my laying out for the D, he did not have time to get out of the way, and crashed into me (I was laying out perpendicular to his direction of motion–I almost never make these sorts of bids for exactly this reason). I took a (collegiate) career-ending injury, and Socks then came on to throw a breakside score for the win. A pretty fitting end for both of our careers, I’d say.

A lot of fun, is how I’d characterize it all. Really, nationals is like any other high-level college tournament–you show up, you play hard, you go home. This is the simple truth of ultimate. Why do we continue to seek glory in this piece of plastic? Well…why not?

This team is moving on already. We have our spring banquet tomorrow (which is way too soon), and after that, I’ll literally have nothing left. It’s pretty sad. You can insert a cliche about taking solace in the progress of the program, but really, there’s not too much of that sentiment right now, just nostalgia. Sitting back, reminiscing, and enjoying the memories.

I’ll likely keep updating this blog for at least the next while, but given that I’m going to be out of competitive ultimate for at least the next year (I’m teaching English in Japan), there will come a time when the new content ceases.

In the meantime, I plan to pour out the essence of my ultimate self here, various skills and teachings that I’ve acquired over my four years here. So, look forward to that I guess.

Signed,
Maaaaaaaaaaaaatt Mackey

“Mackey, why DO you play ultimate?”
I thought for a second.

“…because what I get out of this sport is commensurate with what I put in to it.”
“Why don’t you do crew or something like that?”
“Are you kidding me!? It’s nowhere close…”

I’m not sure exactly what drew me to ultimate in the first place. I went to nerd camp where frisbee was the thing to do; we’d throw it around during breaks, play “ultimate” (good old amoeba play) during activities, and the like. I was (am) pretty athletic (yes, yes, self call, I know. Keep your shirt on), I jumped high and caught frisbees and boys and girls alike were impressed. I was smitten.

Going out of high school and looking at college, I knew I wanted to do SOMETHING with sports, but short of running/jumping on a track team (being a Division I fifth-stringer as a walk-on didn’t sit too well with me), ultimate was IT. I still remember going through the UPA rankings, trying to see if I could discern anything to distinguish the ivies I was looking at from one another. This school, Dartmouth, that my friend went to, they had just made it in 2003! Surely this was a team on the up-and-up, a team that I could jump on to and ride their ascention to the national stage with. And I had so much fun when I came and visited…such were my thoughts, among others, when I chose to come to Dartmouth.

I arrived a wide-eyed freshman, fancying myself the shit because I’d played in summer league–organized ultimate, man!–and showed up knowing what a stack was. I could throw a forehand (without a pivot). Sometimes my hammers went where I wanted them to! It made me really happy when I heard from Pete Gadomski at one point that he thought I was a ’06 because I looked so much like I knew what I was doing. Knowing as much as I did, and being in the shape I was, I had to be a shoo-in for the A-team, right? Right?

Not at all. The ’05s were the big dogs, Seigs and Agan explained to me in the backseat of a car (their “office” during practice), and they had a good feeling about this year–they didn’t have a lot of space to pull up new guys and train them up, taking just Cobbles and Pov from the ’08s. “We want you to work on your defense,” they said. “right now it just seems like you force guys out and try and run the disc down when it gets thrown (admittedly still my favorite thing in ultimate). Work on really sticking with your man and D’ing him up that way on the B-team.”

On the B-team? I put everything I had into getting better, into showing them how wrong they were to not take me on the A-team, to show them how committed I was. And it wasn’t just me. So many conditioning runs, so many wintry practices out at the turf fields, Dorner, Mackey, Crew, Socks, Watson, DeKrey…commitment. Hard work. If it wasn’t practice, it was Socks-Crew-Pov-Mackey doing marker drill on a Friday evening at the river dorms, playing boot, tossing.

My freshman summer, spent in the far East, I threw literally every day after class. I would spend hours perusing the internet for every last bit of information it held. I read the blogs. When I returned to Hanover, I started my own. I kept working, and kept improving, physically, mentally.

Sophomore year, Socks, Wats, and I made it (with a cameo by Crew). Junior year Crew returned, and DeKrey and Dorner came up. We’ve all continued to work through the years, and the fruits of our labor are evident to me every time we’re on the field, every time we toss. Every throw is a throwback. Turfed backhands, wobbly forehands, have become near certainties. Whereas I once dashed around haphazardly hoping for a floaty frisbee, I now cut with purpose for leading passes. While I used to wait and bait, I now dictate and dominate. My attachment to this sport, and the people I share it with, is the single most fulfilling component of my Dartmouth experience.

Riding back from a practice at Radcliffe with Dorner, DeKrey, and Crew, joking at an intersection, I was struck with the thought of just how perfect it all was, how there’s absolutely nothing else I’d prefer doing. I could’ve ridden forever, but these moments are fleeting. We’ve invested so much time in this sport, and in each other, and for what?…

“Are you kidding me!? It’s nowhere close.” With crew, what do you do? Pull strokes on the erg? With ultimate, there is SO MUCH you can do to improve. It’s not just the physical work, but the strategy, the teamwork…spending time together with my teammates makes us all better players. And not just better players, better people. I have gotten SO MUCH out of my time here at Dartmouth, and with the team…I’m an entirely different person now than I was before I got here, and it all stems from this singular obsession of mine, born of some nonchalant tossing and an innocent fascination with a piece of plastic.

So we come to Regionals. Whenever somebody who doesn’t really follow ultimate/somebody I don’t talk to about it regularly asks about my season, I refer to Regionals as “Pretty much the culmination of my four years here at Dartmouth.” Like Nate said, though, the results are not what define us. For me, going into this weekend with the strength and certainty of years of commitment and work and, why lie, obsession, with this sport, with this group, with Our Team, I am, simply, exhilarated. There is no greater feeling than the rush that comes with a hard-fought game, win or lose. The flow of the moment, the unaldulteated joy of letting it all go…it is for precisely these moments that I work so hard. To be able to give my best, alongside my best friends, there is nothing more than this that I can ask for.

I have to confess that I’ve actually been tearing up, if not crying, a fair bit reading some of these blitzes. The meaning that this team, that Our Team, has taken on, cannot be captured in words (despite my liberal use of them in attempt here). I see it when we play, though. Every time I hear a “hoo ungawa!” Every time Owen demands better from somebody, be it himself, his teammates, or his opponent. Every sprint down on every pull, every goal caught, every joyous celebration…every time we huddle up. It’s always there, that desire to give more, to become less a collection of 23 and more a team of one, united will.

I love each and every one of you. As I sit here typing this I feel a surge of energy–that energy doesn’t come from me; it comes from you. Our investment in one another is our truest strength. As we play this weekend, never forget that. Put everything you have into the moment at hand, into supporting your teammates, with your play, with your attitude, with your energy, with your HEART, and our united will will be put on display for all to see.

I don’t play for myself. I don’t play for Dartmouth. I play for Mike Zargham, Carson Thomas, Nate Raines, Watson Sallay, Alex Crew, Zach Dorner, Sam Haynor, Pete Bonanno, Will DeKrey, Dermott McHugh, Owen Roberts, Dave Schmidt, Nick Brown, Billy McCarthy, Graham Baecher, Misha Sidorsky, Robin Meyers, Alex Kell, Nathaniel Obler, Chase Raines, Lars Osterberg, and Alex Taylor. I play for YOU.

-Mackey